Indeed, it is an honor to
be asked by accomplished and highly respected colleagues to
participate in a symposium devoted to rethinking the bordered
configurations of landmasses which have been defined, constructed,
and maintained, with force, as the various racialized and
ethnicized nation-states and regions of the “Americas.”
And, devoted, as well, to rethinking the disciplinary and
interdisciplinary ventures in terms of which knowledges of various
kinds regarding these Americas are produced, validated, justified,
legitimated, mediated, institutionalized, refined, and maintained;
by and in service to whom; according to what agendas. I am, then,
pleased to share in these rethinking efforts, but more than a bit
chastened by the challenges to be faced in accepting the task of
offering reconsiderations of “African American Studies”
as my contribution.

However, these are
exhilarating challenges, thus I welcome the opportunity the
invitation has provided to join colleagues in collaborative
rethinkings which, if we continue our efforts and are successful,
may well substantially alter the terms and means by which we
produce and mediate knowledges of matters “American” at
Vanderbilt University, certainly. (We must get on with the
production and mediation and leave to others beyond Vanderbilt
judgments of the propriety and significance of our efforts.) To a
substantial degree, our University is in transition: is being
subjected to willful renovations of a number of its intellectual
and social organizational agendas intended to enhance its mission
and the fulfillment of it. As part of this process, we are
compelled to rethink not only what we do in many areas of
knowledge-production and mediation, but to rethink who we take
ourselves to be and whom we serve in the production and
mediation of knowledges. Rethinking, then, cuts
deeply…

Which is why I am so challenged by joining
in these efforts as, in part, Director of African American Studies,
a program that has waxed and waned at Vanderbilt (more the latter
than the former, I think) for more than two decades. Its emergence
was very much a part of developments throughout the USA from the
late 60s through the 70s during which nationalist sentiments and
agendas were relatively ascendant among the political, economic,
social, and, more broadly, cultural projects of dispersed
Negroes-becoming-Black folks, becoming Afro-Americans,
becoming-African Americans, becoming-Africans in the US, in the
Americas. Out of the quest for “Black Power!” there
emerged pressured quests for greater access for black folks to
educational opportunities in Historically White Colleges and
Universities (HWCUs), soon followed by pressured quests for
education (courses, programs, pedagogy) more relevant to the
needs and aspirations of persons more highly conscious,
self-conscious, and self-affirming of their being of African
descent, being a blackpeople, as they defined
their needs and aspirations; then pressured quests for more black
educators (and support staff and resources such as Black Cultural
Centers and programming) to produce and mediate this more
appropriate and relevant black knowledge by and about black
people(s) to black students, first and foremost, but on terms and
in ways that would serve the decidedly progressive
historical development of black folk in US America, and elsewhere
(for example, in decolonizing Africa and the African diaspora).

Thus, the mission of Black Studies
knowledge-production and mediation: to facilitate the liberation of
black peoples (and, by extension, white folks, too, though this was
not on most Black Studies agendas early in the struggle) from the
ravages of white racial supremacy and to promote black
self-determination and healthy self-affirmation; and, as well, to
re-educate all regarding the full and undistorted truths of the
histories of African peoples and their descendants, on the African
continent and throughout the Diasporas, of these peoples’ and
descendants’ achievements and contributions to the
storehouses of human civilization, of their future possibilities
beyond the limitations of suppressive racial apartheid. A two-fold
mission, then, one both academic and socio-political in the fullest
senses: production and mediation of decidedly new knowledges in the
Academy, but in service to the needs and aspirations of black folks
generally for freedom and unfettered opportunities to
fashion and enjoy lives of flourishing to the fullest extent
available.

The production and mediation of knowledges
in service to liberation and flourishing of black folks, knowledges
to be shared with all. However, fulfilling this mission requires
coordinated knowledge-production and mediation of a number of
disciplines, especially History, Religion, Sociology, Political
Science, Economics, Creative Production (i.e., Art, Literature,
Music, Dance, other Performing Arts), and Psychology according to a
model articulated by Maulana Karenga in the most prominent textbook
in Black/African American Studies.[1] That is, as the critical and systematic study
of the thought and practice of African people in their current and
historical unfolding…,[2] such studies require the resources of all
disciplinary ventures in knowledge-production having to do with
human beings, though in this case particularized to inquiries and
articulations with black folks as both subject-matters and
Subjects, both the objects and producers of the knowledges,
historically and contemporarily, wherever black folks have been and
are.

This imperative, then, sets yet another
challenging requirement: the coordinated production of knowledges
of black folks, as dispersed peoples, in various life-worlds and
geo-political settings. Hence the need to attend to studies of
black folks throughout the Americas. This need was recognized and
attended to by many in the early days of establishing programs of
studies, indicated by the naming of particular endeavors as
“Pan-African Studies Programs / Centers /
Institutes” (University of Pittsburgh, Temple University); or
“African and African American Studies” Programs /
Centers / Institutes / Departments; or, later, “Africana
Studies” Programs / Centers / Institutes / Departments. Last
Spring, members of Vanderbilt’s African American Studies
Committee, while rethinking aspects of the Program, agreed that, as
part of the renovation of the Program, its name should be changed
to “Africana Studies” to both guide and reflect a
broadening of our focus from folks of African descent in the USA,
primarily, and in continental Africa, to folks of African descent
in the Caribbean and the Americas, as well. This symposium, then,
is especially timely in occasioning further considerations of this
needed refocusing and renovation of our African American Studies
Program. For in ‘looking southward’ from the USA, we
will need the assistance of colleagues working the Americas as we
develop and refine more expansive understandings of African and
African-descended peoples in terms of their Diaspora-creating
relocations to New Worlds and the resulting processes and
consequences of intra- and inter-group relations in the ongoing
shaping and living of life in the Americas with all of the
consequent diversities, even among black folks.

These were matters that engaged
scholar-researchers long before the rupture of political struggle
over knowledge-production and mediation in the 60s and 70s.
Melville Herskovits was an early pioneer, as were W.E.B. Du Bois,
Carter G. Woodson, William Leo Hansberry before (1800s) and after
him. One early challenging issue for these knowledge-workers,
perhaps even more challenging today, is the matter of determining
just what makes for the defining characteristics of persons and
peoples “African,” especially after forced and
voluntary relocations to, and long stays in, locations in which
cross-generational more or less communal lives have had to be made
in contexts complicated by varying degrees of diversity as a
function of the presence of other bio-cultural population groups in
political unities virtually always structured by racialized
super-and sub-ordinations. Herskovits, for example, devoted
considerable intellectual energy to the development and deployment
of strategies for empirical determination of the degrees of
persistence of various aspects of characteristic continental
ethno-cultural life of Africans in New World settings, with
explanations as to where and why the greater or less persistence of
particular characteristics and, overall, of the
“retention” of Old World characteristics in New World
settings.[3] Others,
Du Bois in particular, but Martin Delany and other “black
nationalists” as well, worried about the prospects for folks
of African descent were they to become more fully integrated into
political and economic unities in which the bio-cultural hegemony
of white racial supremacy persisted, through inertia if no longer
as a function of explicit, enforced programs.
“Integration,” “assimilation,”
“segregation,” “separation,”
“emigration”—these continue to be competing, not
always clearly delineated options debated by black folks facing the
challenges of forging viable life-worlds of freedom and justice in
which to flourish in the context of nation-states and regions
plagued by legacies and consequences of white racial supremacy and
enriched otherwise by the challenges of bio-cultural diversity.

The organization and pursuit of the
production and mediation of knowledges by and about black folks
have always been conditioned by such concerns, even so far as to
compel some knowledge workers involved to craft epistemological
norms explicitly designed to serve the needs and interests of black
folks. Hence, the much maligned and misunderstood, in far too many
cases the willfully not understood, normative notion of
Afrocentricity[4]. While this is not an appropriate occasion to flesh out
all that is involved in this highly charged heuristic notion, I
must say, though, that it is imperative that those of us
involved with “rethinking the Americas” in part by
rethinking the resources and agendas we bring to bear on the
production and mediation of knowledges regarding the Americas and
the peoples therein, give studied, respectful attention to efforts
at knowledge-production and mediation that seek to be
“Afrocentric”: that is, that seek to ground or
“center” knowledge-production and mediation about, by,
and for black folks on or in the histories, cultures, experiences,
needs, accomplishments, and aspirations of black folks as
defined by and for black folks, though without invidious
concerns for peoples who are neither African nor
African-descended.

What is at issue here are matters of no
small consequence to knowledge-production and mediation: the
“situatedness” of all knowledge-production and
mediation; and, especially, the calling into question of the
pernicious, distorting lie that all knowledge-production and
mediation in the so-called “West” in general, in the
USA in particular, among the driving forces of
“Modernity,” have proceeded as enterprises exempt from
and thereby uninfluenced by—thus, not in service to—the
racialized organization of modern European nation-states, the
global expansions of peoples of Europe to other lands where they
and their descendants established racialized nation-states, and the
brutal establishment by cooperating, nation-state-based white folks
of a hegemonic World System defined, in significant part, by
racialized capitalism. Put differently, we must give serious,
critical consideration to “the Afrocentric
initiative”[5]
the better to satisfy the necessity of giving serious, critical
consideration to “Eurocentrism”: what Samir Amin
characterizes as a collection of ideas and ideals; norms and
practices; attitudes, sentiments, customs, and habits—in
short, a cultural complex—that motivated, informed, and
legitimated social, political, and economic orderings of life, of
peoples. Two key aspects of this complex had to do with racialized
hierarchies of peoples ordered by notions of white racial supremacy
(and anchored by a metaphysics and ontology of The Great Chain of
Being[6]) and by a
capitalist political economy with universalist
aspirations—that is, a desire of peoples of Europe to
dominate the globe economically, civilizationally, and
racially.[7] I am
firmly convinced that the ideals and models of “Reason”
and “rationality” that long have been taken to be
normatively definitive of European and Euro-US American Modernity,
and thus normative for all who would “reason” properly
in the production and mediation of knowledge, were intricately and
intimately associated with the imperialism and racism of
Eurocentrism, claims to the contrary notwithstanding, likewise the
denials, certified ignorance, and fearful refusals-to-see of many
white savants in the discipline of Philosophy who have devoted
their careers to being guardians of proper Reason while suffering
the illusion of epistemological neutrality and innocence. The
Afrocentric initiative is a call for an explicitly partisan
epistemology as a necessary corrective to the invidiously partisan
epistemology and politics of Eurocentrism that drove the formation
of the “Americas.” Consideration of Afrocentric and
Eurocentric initiatives must be a part of any appropriate
rethinking of knowledge-production and mediation in the Americas,
regarding peoples African and African-descended in particular.

Yet, as I noted at the outset, rethinking
cuts deeply. So, too, for even the most committed Afrocentrist,
especially when the rethinking proceeds as a collaborative venture
with others who have similar, but different, commitments and in the
context of an institution historically and predominantly white in
the US American South. Black, African American, Africana Studies
generally, via an Afrocentric orientation and agenda particularly,
have always been conditioned by concerns for identifying and
anchoring—finding anchorage for—what have been thought
to be the constitutive racial/ethnic and/or cultural
characteristics determining the identity, authenticity, and thus
the very integrity of African and African-descended persons as
peoples as such, and for setting political agendas by which
to achieve appropriate, persistent conditions for flourishing lives
of freedom and justice. During the last two decades or so, there
has been an explosion of academic interest in racial matters, one
consequence being the marshalling of substantial effort to make the
case that identities defined by raciality have no scientifically
real biological or anthological bases, thus neither ethical nor
political legitimacy; consequently, we are urged to get on, with
renewed urgency and assurance, with eradicating all conceptions and
practices of life-world fashioning and maintenance, all
valorizations, that invest in notions of raciality.[8] I, however, am not so persuaded:
either that we can or should eradicate all conceptions of
raciality, though I am devoted to struggles to counter and
minimize, to the greatest degree possible, invidious racialism or
racism.[9] Just how
to forge a middle way between racist and ‘no race’
positions is a continuing challenge, one that I think is a defining
feature of the unfinished project of democratic nation-formation
that is the United States of America. Those of us responsible for
African American Studies thus have weighty obligations in the
rethinking effort: to make a viable case for racialized or
ethnicized identities and thus for the production and mediation of
knowledges in their behalf, but on terms and in ways that further,
as well, the increased and enhanced realization of democratic,
racially and ethnically pluralistic life in the Americas.

When considering this challenging
obligation that is at the same time a wonderful opportunity for a
knowledge-worker, I often have recourse to an effort by Du Bois to
work out a framework of understanding by which to proceed. This was
set forth by Du Bois in a presentation he made to a conference of
social science teachers in Charlotte, North Carolina during April
1960, and published in Quarterly Review of Higher Education
Among Negroes, July 1960, Vol. 28, pp. 135-41: “Whither
Now and Why.”[10] The matter of concern to Du Bois was the consequence of
the increasingly successful realization by Negroes of equality in
citizenship in the USA:

The American Negro has now reached a point in his
progress where he needs to take serious account of where he is and
whither he is going. This day has come much earlier than I thought
it would…what we must now ask ourselves is when we become
equal American citizens what will be our aims and ideals and what
will we have to do with selecting these aims and ideals. Are we to
assume that we will simply adopt the ideals of Americans and become
what they are or want to be and that we will have in this process
no ideals of our own?[11]

Du Bois’s answer to the last question
was an emphatic but carefully negotiated “No! What I have
been fighting for and am still fighting for is the possibility of
black folk and their cultural patterns existing in America without
discrimination; and on terms of equality…We must accept
equality or die. What we must also do is to lay down a line of
thought and action which will accomplish two things: The utter
disappearance of color discrimination in American life and the
preservation of African history and culture as a valuable
contribution to modern civilization as it was to medieval and
ancient civilization.”[12] The exhilarating challenge in this call is the
delicate, fraught-with-danger quest for affirmations of heretofore
racialized identities and cultures without fear-motivated
aspirations for either dominance or revenge, the quest for unity
and diversity, for pluralistic democracy affirming
racialities and ethnicities without chauvinism. How? From Du Bois,
again: on the basis of ideals that “must always be in accord
with the greater ideals of mankind.”[13] And what Du Bois urged of Negroes, I
think is pertinent to those of us involved in rethinking the
Americas and rethinking our ventures in knowledge-production and
mediation. Namely, that such ventures are to be devoted not to
ourselves and our agendas as cloistered professionals, but to the
education of those who are and will be citizens of the constituent
communities, organizations, institutions, populations, and
nation-states of the Americas: “…what American Negroes
must remember is that voluntary organization for great ends is far
different from compulsory segregation for evil
purposes.”[14]

To my mind, this is one of the profound and
crucial challenges facing knowledge-workers today, especially those
committed to thought and praxis concerning the production and
mediation of knowledges, especially terms and values by which to
organize life democratically in racially and ethnically pluralist
polities: namely, how to achieve and sustain voluntary
organizations of racial and ethnic groupings (and multiracial and
multiethnic groupings, too) for great ends while curtailing
compulsory segregation for evil purposes. This, indeed, is a major
impetus for me to join others in rethinking the Americas,
rethinking the ventures in knowledge-production and mediation in
terms of which we think, and live, the Americas.

[8]See, for example, Kwame A. Appiah,
In My Father’s House, a work in which such a position
is argued by a most respected friend and colleague with whom
I’ve had numerous debates regarding the propriety of
regarding particular self-reproducing population groups as
“races.” See, also, his “Race, Culture, Identity:
Misunderstood Connections,” in K. Anthony Appiah and Amy
Gutmann, Color Conscious: The Political Morality of Race
(Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1996),
30-105.